When a bill is not a bill

Tuesday

Mar 5, 2013 at 12:01 AM

If you read through the more than 2,100 bills introduced by the Feb. 22 deadline for this year’s session of the Legislature, you might expect to have a pretty good idea what lawmakers are planning to achieve.

Dana M. Nichols

If you read through the more than 2,100 bills introduced by the Feb. 22 deadline for this year’s session of the Legislature, you might expect to have a pretty good idea what lawmakers are planning to achieve.

Think again.

In fact, hundreds of those bills are so called “spot bills,” or place holders with no substantive lawmaking. Many of those spot bills contain obscure sections of existing California law with a few token changes of words.

Often, the changes are as small as crossing out the word “the” and replacing it with an “a.”

In many cases, the spot bills serve a legitimate function, and are ultimately amended with new laws directly related to the section of code in the original filing.

But sometimes, spot bills are used later in the legislative session to create laws that have nothing to do with the original listing.

“There is absolute game playing that goes on with this stuff,” said David Wolfe, legislative director for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

The practice is in the limelight right now after California’s Third Appellate District Court in January ruled unconstitutional a maneuver involving a spot bill that legislators used last year to change the order of items on the November ballot.

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association filed the suit. What happened was that a blank spot bill, AB1499, was passed in March, saying only that the Legislature intended to “enact statutory changes related to the budget.”

Later, the already passed bill was amended in June under the pretense that it was part of a budget appropriation. What it really did was to allow Democrats to help Proposition 30, the governor’s tax increase proposals, by moving it to the top of the November ballot.

Even though the matter was moot by the time the Third Appellate Court ruled, the court decided it was important to rule anyway to signal that such maneuvers are unconstitutional.

Wolfe and other observers say few spot bills are used in such an egregious way. Legislative staffers say the majority, in fact, are exactly what they say — place holders intended to be used for legitimate lawmaking.

But several staffers contacted for this story did acknowledge that they could not guarantee the ultimate language in the spot bills would have any connection to the bill introduced in February.

Among legislators in the immediate region, Senator Tom Berryhill had the most spot bills this year with at least nine. Assemblyman Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, who represents the Lodi area, had five. State Senator Cathleen Galgiani, D-Stockton, had three and Assemblywoman Susan Eggman, D-Stockton, had two.

Christian Burkin, a spokesman for Eggman, said that within a few weeks, the assemblywoman’s spot bills would be updated with substantive language.

“We didn’t have the language ready in time for the deadline,” Burkin said. “We are not holding them indefinitely.”

Assemblywoman Kristin Olsen, R-Modesto, had two spot bills. Her spokeswoman, Kim Nickols, said in an email that both bills will go through the legislature in a “transparent manner.”

Nickols also noted that Olsen has introduced a constitutional amendment, ACA4, that would increase transparency by requiring any proposed law to be in print for 72 hours before legislators could act on it.